Antrodoco

On Monte Giano, which stands over the town, there is a word written with trees: DVX, legible from kilometres away. The pine wood that forms it covers about eight hectares and counted twenty thousand pines; it was planted in 1939 by the forest guards' cadet school of Cittaducale, with the arms of many local youths, as a homage to Mussolini. It was restored with regional funds in 2004, then at the end of August 2017 a fire destroyed almost all of it, and in February 2018 two hundred volunteers climbed up to plant a thousand pines: not to remake the word, but because without the wood that slope slides. The situation remains critical. The town's name, meanwhile, says the opposite of being in plain sight: it comes from the Oscan Interocrium, from the root ocre, that is among the mountains, and Strabo calls it Vicus Interocrea. It is indeed ringed by three mountain groups, and the Velino runs through it at the mouth of the gorges.

Between the seventh and the tenth of March 1821, in those gorges, was fought what is remembered as the first battle of the Italian Risorgimento. General Guglielmo Pepe had set his headquarters in the town and drawn up artillery to close the pass; his Neapolitan troops moved out in two columns, were forced to fall back, and between the ninth and the tenth the Austrians of general Frimont broke the defences and entered Antrodoco. Frimont was rewarded by his king with a title of nobility: prince of Antrodoco. The town's name, in short, went to the man who had taken it. Before that there had been a mansio here on the via Salaria, where Vespasian passed with his sons Titus and Domitian, and Latin sources already praised the sulphurous waters, exploited until the nineteen-eighties and now abandoned; in the thirteenth century the contado of Antrodoco gave more castles than any other to the founding of L'Aquila, after the Abruzzo capital itself. On the fourth and fifth of September 1862 the Velino flooded, razed the church of Sant'Anna — one column of it remains — and killed thirty-nine people.